Lin Biao incident

Outline Official Chinese narrative with Ye Qun According to the Chinese government, Lin Biao was made aware that Mao no longer trusted him after the 9th Central Committee, and he harbored a strong desire to seize supreme power. In February 1971 Lin and his wife, Ye Qun (who was then a Politburo member), began to plot Mao's assassination. In March 1971, Lin's son, Lin Liguo (who was a senior Air Force officer) held a secret meeting with his closest followers at an Air Force base in Shanghai. At this meeting, Lin Liguo and his subordinates supposedly drafted a plan to organize a coup, titled "Project 571". In Chinese, "5-7-1" (), is a homophone for "armed uprising" (). Later that March, the group met again to formalize the structure of command following the proposed coup. Mao was unaware of the coup plot, and, in August 1971, scheduled a conference for September to determine the political fate of Lin Biao. On 15 August, Mao left Beijing to discuss the issue with other senior political and military leaders in southern China. On 5 September, Lin received reports that Mao was preparing to purge him. On 8 September, Lin gave the order to his subordinates to proceed with the coup. Realizing that Mao was now fully aware of his abortive coup, Lin's party first considered fleeing south to their base of power in Guangzhou, where they would establish an alternate "Party headquarters" and attack armed forces loyal to Mao. After hearing that Premier Zhou Enlai was investigating the incident, they abandoned this plan as impractical, and decided to flee to the Soviet Union instead. In the early morning of 13 September, Lin Biao, Ye Qun, Lin Liguo, and several personal aides attempted to flee to the Soviet Union piloted by Pan Jingyin, the deputy commander of the PLAAF 34th division. The aircraft did not take aboard enough fuel before taking off, ran out of fuel, and crashed near Öndörkhaan in Mongolia on 13 September 1971. Pre-1994 international view of official Chinese explanation The exact circumstances surrounding Lin's death remain unclear, due to a lack of surviving evidence. Many of the original government records relevant to Lin's death were secretly and intentionally destroyed, with the approval of the Politburo, during the brief period of Hua Guofeng's interregnum in the late 1970s. Among the records destroyed were telephone records, meeting minutes, personal notes, and desk diaries. The records, if they had survived, would have clarified the activities of Mao, Zhou Enlai, Jiang Qing, and Wang Dongxing relative to Lin, before and after Lin's death. Since 1971, scholars outside of China have been skeptical of the government's official explanation of the circumstances surrounding Lin's death. Skeptics assert the official narrative does not sufficiently explain why Lin, one of Mao's closest supporters and one of the most successful Communist generals, would suddenly attempt a poorly planned, abortive coup. The government narrative also does not sufficiently explain how and why Lin's aircraft crashed. Skeptics have claimed Lin's decision to flee to the Soviet Union was illogical, on the grounds the United States or Taiwan would have been safer destinations. Because the Chinese government never produced evidence to support their report that Lin was on board the aircraft, Western scholars originally doubted Lin had died in the crash. One book, published anonymously using a Chinese pseudonym in 1983, claimed Mao had actually had Lin and his wife killed in Beijing, and Lin Liguo had attempted to escape by air. Other scholars suggested Mao ordered the Chinese army to shoot down Lin's aircraft over Mongolia. The Chinese government has no interest in re-evaluating its narrative on Lin Biao's death. When contacted in 1994 for its comment on fresh evidence that surfaced on the Lin Biao incident after the Cold War, the Chinese Foreign Ministry stated: "China already has a clear, authoritative conclusion about the Lin Biao incident. Other foreign reports of a conjectural nature are groundless." Non-Chinese scholars interpreted China's reluctance to consider contradictory evidence of its "official" history as the result of a desire to avoid exploring any issue that might lead to criticism of Mao Zedong or a re-evaluation of the Cultural Revolution in general, which might distract China from pursuing economic growth. Subsequent scholarship and reliable eyewitness accounts , provenance of the aircraft A six-month investigation by Western scholars in 1994 examined evidence in Russia, Mongolia, mainland China, the United States, and Taiwan, and came to a number of conclusions, some of which were contrary to the official Chinese version of events. The study confirmed Lin Biao, Ye Qun, and Lin Liguo were all killed in the crash. Lin's aircraft was travelling away from the Soviet Union at the time of its crash, making the exact sequence of events before Lin's death more confusing, and casting doubt on the possibility that Lin was attempting to seek asylum in the USSR. Lin's wife and son may have forced Lin to board the aircraft against his will. Several senior leaders within the Communist Party hierarchy knew Lin and his family would flee, but chose not to attempt to stop their flight. According to this study, Lin had attempted to contact the Kuomintang in Taiwan on two separate occasions shortly before his death. At 10 p.m. the night before Lin's party fled, Ye Qun announced the family would board an aircraft at 7 the next morning to fly to Guangzhou. Lin's 27-year-old daughter, Lin Liheng (known by the nickname "Doudou") opposed the escape plan, and contacted Lin's bodyguards to request they guard her father from Ye. Doudou then phoned Zhou Enlai, but was not able to contact him directly, and Zhou only received Doudou's report second-hand. Zhou received Doudou's message shortly after Doudou's phone call, directly from the general office of the Central Committee responsible for guarding China's senior leaders. The message contained Doudou's warning that Ye Qun and Lin Liguo were attempting to persuade Lin Biao to flee the country using an aircraft currently being prepared at Qinhuangdao Shanhaiguan Airport. Zhou called Wu Faxian, the commander of the air force, who verified the aircraft's existence. Zhou then issued orders that the aircraft could not take off without the written permission of himself and several other senior military officials, including Wu Faxian, general chief-of-staff Huang Yongsheng, and the commander of the navy and general chief-of-staff, Li Zuopeng. At 11:30, Ye Qun called Zhou and informed him Lin Biao was planning to fly to Dalian, and denied they had prepared an aircraft at Shanhaiguan. Zhou then told Ye to wait for him to travel to see Lin before they left Beidaihe (where they were staying), issued orders to neutralize potentially disruptive officers close to Lin (Wu Faxian and Huang Yongsheng), and ordered two aircraft be readied in Beijing so he could fly to Lin's residence to personally deal with the matter. Ye made an announcement that the party were to pack quickly. Two hours after Doudou contacted Zhou, soldiers had still not responded in any meaningful way. Ye and Lin Liguo woke Lin Biao and packed him into a waiting limousine. The party then drove to Shanhaiguan airport, away from their residence in Beidaihe, where their aircraft was waiting. Lin's bodyguards told Doudou and another companion that they were ordered to take them as well, but Doudou and her companion refused. The crash occurred at around 2:30 AM. None of Zhou's instructions prevented Lin's flight, and he learned Lin's aircraft had taken off before he, himself, could fly to see Lin. Zhou then ordered all aircraft nationwide grounded without the written permission of Mao, himself, and several senior military leaders. He rushed to Zhongnanhai to brief Mao of Lin's flight, and asked Mao if he wanted to order Lin's aircraft shot down, but Mao replied that they should "let him go". At 8:30 p.m., 13 September, the Mongolian Foreign Ministry summoned the Chinese ambassador to make a formal complaint about the unauthorized entrance of an aircraft into Mongolian airspace, and reported to the ambassador that the aircraft had crashed, killing all on board. The Chinese ambassador to Mongolia then phoned Zhou Enlai, who then instructed the ambassador to tell the Mongolians the aircraft had entered Mongolian airspace because it had gone off course. Mongolian investigators were the first to inspect the wreckage, arriving later the same day. They found an identity card belonging to Lin Liguo, confirming Lin Liguo's presence on the flight. Markings on the aircraft and surviving miscellaneous personal items confirmed the aircraft and passengers had originated from China, but the Mongolians were uncertain that any of the dead were either Lin Biao or Ye Qun. After inspecting the crash, the Mongolians buried the dead onsite. Later in 1971 a Soviet medical team secretly traveled to the crash site and exhumed the bodies, which were by then modestly decomposed. The team removed the heads of two of the corpses suspected to be Lin Biao and Ye Qun and took them back to the Soviet Union for forensic examination. In 1972 the team concluded the heads belonged to Lin Biao and Ye Qun (the heads are still stored in Russian archives). In order to corroborate their findings the team returned to Mongolia a second time to inspect the body believed to be Lin Biao's. After exhuming the body a second time the team found remains of tuberculosis — which Lin had suffered from — in the corpse's right lung, confirming the Soviet identification. The Soviet team was not able to determine the cause of the crash, but hypothesized the pilot misjudged his altitude while intentionally flying low to evade radar. Judging from the fires that burned after the crash, the Soviets estimated the aircraft had enough fuel to fly to the Soviet cities of Irkutsk or Chita. All of the work and its results were kept secret from the public: outside of the investigative team, only KGB chairman Yuri Andropov and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev were informed. The report remained classified until the early 1990s, after the end of the Cold War. ==Aftermath==

, presumably after his death. Lin Biao was survived by Doudou and one other daughter. All military officials identified as being close to Lin or his family (most of China's high military command) were purged within weeks of Lin's disappearance. and within a month of Lin's disappearance over 1,000 senior Chinese military officials were purged. The incident marked the end of the myth within the Party that Mao had always been absolutely correct. In the aftermath of the purge of Lin's supporters, Zhou Enlai replaced Lin as the second most powerful man in China, and Jiang Qing and her followers were never able to displace him. Without the support of Lin, Jiang was unable to prevent Zhou's efforts to improve China's relationship with the United States, or to rehabilitate cadres who had been purged during the Cultural Revolution. The clause in the Party constitution indicating that Lin was Mao's successor was not officially amended until the 10th Central Committee in August 1973. The position of the Chinese government on Lin and the circumstances of his death changed several times over the decade following 1971. For over a year, the Party first attempted to cover up the details of Lin's death. The government then began to issue partial details of the event, followed by an anti-Lin Biao propaganda campaign. After Mao's death, in 1976, the government confirmed its condemnation of Lin and generally ceased any dialogue concerning Lin's place in history. Throughout the 1970s, high-ranking leaders of the Chinese Communist Party, including Hua Guofeng, spread the story to foreign delegates that Lin had conspired with the KGB to assassinate Mao. In 1973 Jiang Qing, Mao's fourth wife and a former political ally of Lin's, started the Criticize Lin, Criticize Confucius campaign, aimed at using Lin's scarred image to attack Zhou Enlai. Much of this propaganda campaign involved the creative falsification of history, including (false) details about how Lin had opposed Mao's leadership and tactics throughout his career. Lin's name became involved in Jiang's propaganda campaign after flashcards, made by Ye Qun to record Lin's thoughts, were discovered in Lin's residence following his death. Some of these flashcards recorded opinions critical of Mao. According to Lin's writings, Mao "will fabricate 'your' opinion first, then he will change 'your' opinion – which is not actually yours, but his fabrication. I should be careful of this standard trick." Another critical comment of Lin's states that Mao "worships himself and has a blind faith in himself. He worships himself to such an extent that all accomplishments are attributed to him, but all mistakes are made by others". Lin's private criticisms of Mao were directly contradictory of the public image cultivated by Lin, who publicly stated following the Great Leap Forward that all mistakes of the past were the result of deviating from Mao's instructions. Like many major proponents of the Cultural Revolution, Lin's image was manipulated after Mao's death in 1976, and many negative aspects of the Cultural Revolution were blamed on Lin. After October 1976, those in power also blamed Mao's supporters, the so-called Gang of Four. In 1980, the Chinese government held a series of "special trials" to identify those most responsible for the Cultural Revolution. In 1981, the government released their verdict: that Lin Biao must be held, along with Jiang Qing, as one of the two major "counter-revolutionary cliques" responsible for the excesses of the late 1960s. Among the "crimes" he was charged with was the ouster of China's head of state, President Liu Shaoqi. Lin was found to be primarily responsible for using "false evidence" to orchestrate a "political frame-up" of Liu. Lin has been officially remembered as one of the greatest villains of modern China since then. Lin was never politically rehabilitated, so the charges against him continue to stand. For several decades, Lin's name and image were censored within China, but in recent years a balanced image of Lin has reappeared in popular culture: surviving aides and family members have published memoirs about their experience with Lin; scholars have explored most surviving evidence relevant to his life and death, and have gained exposure within the official Chinese media; movies set before 1949 have made reference to Lin; and Lin's name has re-appeared in Chinese history textbooks, recognizing his contributions to the victory of the Red Army. Within modern China, Lin is regarded as one of the Red Army's best military strategists. In 2007, a big portrait of Lin was added to the Chinese Military Museum in Beijing, included in a display of the "Ten Marshals", a group considered to be the founders of China's armed forces. == See also ==